"My Son, My Family, My Life…With Autism"

Month: July 2018

Woke up this morning to see this in MJ’s room. It’s been years since I’ve seen him line up his toys. He’s had those toy cars and other objects for years and still loves to have them around while he is watching TV or relaxing. I’m not sure if they are lined up in any specific order but I will be on the look out to see if he does this in the same way again. Oh if I could just get into his beautiful mind ❤️.

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For the last few months we have noticed that MJ only watches the TV with the closed captioning on. We have no idea how he knew what that was or how to use it! All of a sudden we realized that every single show he watches now has the closed captioning feature on. What I notice is that he is reading everything as he is watching the show and I believe it helps him understand and process what he’s seeing more easily. The funny thing is that now my daughter is doing the same thing as she watches television. She says, “mommy I like it!” Recently while watching television with my husband, we both looked at each other and said “closed captioning,” because we could not understand what a particular character was saying lol. He now has all of us using that feature so much more. I’m actually glad that he is using it as he seems to be enjoying his favorite television shows even more these days😊.

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I’ve been picking out what MJ wears daily since he was born. As he got older and was able to dress himself (around age 8) we began selecting his clothes then laying the items on the bed so that he could dress himself. About 1 year ago Hubby made me realize that at this point I shouldn’t still be picking out his clothes every day. I agreed with him. I’d been doing it for so long that I forgot that this is a life skill that he must learn to do on his own. For MJ, making decisions is difficult. Unless the choice is McDonald’s or Chick Fil A, he really takes several minutes, maybe even up to an hour to decide on anything else, including whattowear. He gets frustrated and says um, um, um, um, um, 1,237,000 times while continuously pointing at his cheek.

We explain to him that he can select shorts and whatever T shirt he would like. I started out by showing him what shirts and shorts he could select from. He still consistently asks us, “but what should I wear, what shirt, what shorts?” There are days when he can’t decide and because time is not on our side, we end up, again, picking out what he should wear. One day last week, I noticed that he did not ask us what to wear! I went to his room to see him already dressed and putting on his shoes! I was in shock! The funny thing is that his clothes did not match at all lol but I was definitely not going to say anything about that. That didn’t matter at all! I was so proud of him. This summer we will continue to work on this so that he feels confident in selecting the right clothes to wear for any occasion.